Definition
A droitural action is a common law real action brought to recover the right (droit) of property itself in land — that is, the ownership or title — as distinguished from mere possession. Where a possessory action asks the court to restore a party to physical possession of land, a droitural action goes further and places the very right of property in issue. It was among the more ancient and technically demanding forms of real action in English common law.
The term derives directly from the French and Norman legal concept of droit (right), and the droitural action was accordingly understood as an action founded on the right of ownership rather than on a prior seisin or possessory interest. The writ of right (breve de recto) was the paradigmatic droitural action.
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Common Confusion
DROITURAL ACTION vs. POSSESSORY ACTION: The distinction is foundational to the old common law real action system. A possessory action (such as novel disseisin or mort d'ancestor) asserted only that the plaintiff had been wrongfully dispossessed of seisin; it did not adjudicate ultimate title. A droitural action, by contrast, put the entire right of property before the court. The practical consequence was that a judgment in a possessory action did not bar a later droitural action — the party defeated on possession could still bring the right of property before a court. This hierarchy meant droitural actions were broader in scope but also more cumbersome and dangerous, as they allowed the defendant to demand trial by battle. The two categories should never be conflated in historical research, as their procedural consequences, available defenses, and preclusive effects differed substantially.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The principal droitural action at common law was the writ of right (breve de recto), which lay to recover freehold land based on the demandant's right of property. Allied forms included:
- Writ of right of dower (where dower had been withheld)
- Writ of right close (for copyhold or lands held of a particular manor)
- Formedon in the descender, remainder, and reverter (droitural in character, asserting a right derived from a gift in tail or reversion)
These forms shared the droitural character — placing the right of property directly in issue — though they varied in the nature of the right asserted and the court of competent jurisdiction.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a category of legal vocabulary that was already largely obsolete by the time the major American legal dictionaries were compiled. Researchers encountering droitural action in primary sources will almost always be working with English common law materials predating the nineteenth century, or with American colonial and early republic materials that still reflected the inherited forms of action.
Several navigational traps exist for corpus researchers:
First, the term appears primarily in treatises on real property and the forms of action — Blackstone's Commentaries, Littleton's Tenures, and Coke upon Littleton — rather than in reported cases with any frequency, because droitural actions were notoriously slow and fell into practical disuse well before formal abolition.
Second, the possessory/droitural distinction organized an entire system of real property litigation. When reading eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century American property opinions, the court's characterization of an action as droitural or possessory controls which procedural rules, statutes of limitation, and preclusion principles apply. Misreading this characterization can lead to significant misunderstanding of the holding.
Third, in England the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and ultimately the Common Law Procedure Act 1852 effectively abolished the old real actions, collapsing the possessory/droitural distinction. American jurisdictions abolished the old forms of action at varying points — many through Field Code adoption in the mid-nineteenth century — but the vocabulary persisted in equity and title opinions for decades after the forms themselves disappeared.
Fourth, Rapalje & Lawrence redirects the reader to DROIT rather than providing a standalone entry for droitural action, which is itself a research signal: dictionaries of that era assumed the reader would reconstruct the compound concept from its components. Researchers using those dictionaries should always check the root-word entry.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence does not provide a standalone definition of droitural action, directing the reader instead to the entry for DROIT. This is consistent with the practice of late nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries, which often treated derivative or compound terms by cross-reference to the root concept rather than with independent analysis.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary (earlier editions) does address the droitural/possessory distinction explicitly, treating droitural actions as those founded on the right of property and possessory actions as those founded on a recent seisin or possession — a formulation that tracks Blackstone directly. Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III) remains the most systematic treatment available, distinguishing droitural and possessory actions as the two great divisions of real actions and explaining that the former put in issue "the mere right of property" while the latter addressed only "the right of possession."
What historical dictionaries generally miss is the practical dimension: droitural actions were functionally rare even in the eighteenth century. The writ of right was technically available but procedurally arduous and permitted wager of battle as a mode of trial until its formal abolition in England in 1819. American practice largely avoided it for the same reasons. Historical sources therefore tend to define the droitural action more carefully than it was ever used, and researchers should not infer frequency of use from precision of definition.
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Jurisdictional Note
The droitural/possessory distinction was inherited from English common law and applied in American colonial and early republic practice, but its practical significance varied by colony and then by state. Jurisdictions that adopted reformed pleading codes early (New York by 1848, followed by numerous others) merged the forms of action into a single civil action, formally ending the operational relevance of the distinction. English abolition followed a different but roughly contemporaneous timeline.
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